The two week-long international break did, admits Partick Thistle striker Miley Storey, feel like an eternity.

The Jags’ final game before the league shut down was not a resounding success, with a 3-0 defeat to Hearts giving Storey and his teammates plenty to stew over while they were waiting for league business to resume.

The break has finally come to an end and with Thistle languishing in eleventh place in the Scottish Premiership and just eight games of the season remaining, every point is valuable.

Partick travel to Easter Road to take on Hibs on Saturday and Storey cannot wait to get back into action and attempt to rectify what went wrong during their last outing in Edinburgh.

“I’m really looking forward to the Hibs game - the international break didn’t come at the best time for us coming off the game we had just before it,” he said.

“So this weekend, we’re looking to put a few things right and put in a much better performance than we did the last time.

“It was tough having those two weeks off the back of that game but we’ve done some good, hard training and then this week has been more about focusing on what we need to do on Saturday. It’s crunch-time in the season with the split coming up but we really need to take some points before the split to be honest."

it is not all doom and gloom though, with Storey maintaining an air of optimism.

“As bad as the performance against Hearts was, in the second half we created a few chances and I had a few chances myself so we definitely played better. We just hadn’t given ourselves a platform with the first half performance we had so we need to change that.

“But we can take positives from some recent games - we played well against Aberdeen and also in some games just after the winter break so we need to look back at them and replicate that form because we need points now.”

Thistle are three points clear of bottom-placed Ross County and with the Jags taking on Ross County on Tuesday evening, Storey is in no doubt that the relegation battle is really heating up. But the situation is in Thistle’s control and that is all Storey is focusing on.

“At the minute, it’s still in our hands so we need to concentrate on ourselves more than anything," he said.

"Despite having had some disappointing results, it always seems to be in our hands but that will only remain the case if we start taking points.

“In this league, if you win a couple of games, you can shoot up so we’re just concentrating on ourselves not thinking about other teams around us.

“It’s a big game on Tuesday but we’re mainly concentrating on Saturday first because although Hibs are a very good side, I do think we have qualities that we can hurt them with.

“And we need to look at every single game as one where we can get points from.

“There hasn’t been too much talk about Tuesday yet but we know that it’s a massive game for us. So we’ll get Saturday out the way and then start thinking about Ross County after that.”